A Tree With Roots

New Questlove book and film coming. Plus: news and politics, cartoons and humor, and music from Bessie Smith, Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Leonard Cohen.

It’s been interesting to see, in viewing the stats on total clicks for various links with each day’s posting here, that so few readers take the trouble to click on text links. Music videos: sure! Film trailers: okay! Humorous vids: maybe. But text links—to the full story beyond my brief snapshot: Very rare. I take it that people, with little time and perhaps several other newsletters sitting in their in-box, just want the quick news nugget or quip, and prefer skimming for cartoons and watching/listening to the music. Fair enough, but I will probably take less time inserting links going forward. Now for today….and don’t forget to subscribe, it’s free.

News & Politics

Stephen Colbert: “The war in Afghanistan has been going on for almost 20 years. To put that another way, this war is too old to date Matt Gaetz.”

The Onion: “Hundreds Of Companies Voice Opposition To GOP Voting Limits—On Memo Line Of Their Donation Checks.”

Samantha Bee with a four-minute segment on anti-Asian violence.

Matt Gaetz announced a six-figure ad buy for a spot that targets CNN as he fights to save his career.

A House committee voted on Wednesday to recommend for the first time the creation of a commission to consider providing Black Americans with reparations for slavery and a “national apology” for centuries of discrimination. And the same day: A North Texas school district said it had disciplined a group of students at a predominantly white school who assigned prices to students of color in a Snapchat group message called “Slave Trade.”

Trevor Noah tweeted that there are many good cops but a rotten system: "We're not dealing with bad apples, we're dealing with a rotten tree that happens to grow some good apples...."

Court & Spark: Some Dems in Congress will introduce legislation today to expand SCOTUS by four seats. It has no chance of advancing…. Meanwhile, a House committee has approved D.C. statehood and it will likely pass the full chamber. But the Senate?

Anyone else disappointed Bernie Madoff didn’t get a chance to serve out his full 150-year term?

Vax and ye shall receive: “Despite conservative resistance, many businesses and some states are plowing ahead with vaccine passports, which verify that people have been vaccinated,” Axios reports. “The list of universities requiring proof of vaccination is growing.”

Politico on Afghanistan pullout: “Biden and his top national security deputies did what no previous president has done successfully — they overrode the brass. … [It] is Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan who are truly ‘running the Pentagon,’ according to two former officials familiar with the discussions.”

Covid cases rose nationally last week by about 6.7 percent, and 36 states saw their seven-day average for new cases increase in the past week. Hospitalizations grew by 3.8 percent in 31 states. In Michigan: Hospitalizations in the state have hit their highest levels since the start of the pandemic, including 45 children, a record high. Yet the CDC vaccine panel yesterday unexpectedly delayed a new decision on Johnson & Johnson shot, deadlocked on whether or how to limit use of the vacccine based on sex or age.

Olympics host city Tokyo, 100 days before the Olympics: 591 Covid cases, highest level in over two months.

Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization, has seen a 55% increase in need since the pandemic began. An estimated 42M people in America face hunger, including 13 million children.

The Muldrow Glacier in Alaska, meanwhile, is moving 100 times its normal rate.

A Major Change in Baseball—Moving the Mound Back: With strikeouts up and less action than ever, MLB will try moving the pitchers back by a foot in a trial in the independent Atlantic League. It’s been 60’6” in the majors since…before Babe Ruth.

Great Mad magazine writer Frank Jacobs has died at 91.

Books

Brandi Carlile’s memoir, which I’ve flacked for awhile, will debut at #1 on NY Times bestseller list this weekend.

Questlove, The Roots drummer, has announced a new book, titled Music Is History, that will look back at the past 50 years through the “prism” of popular music. It will focus on one song from each year between 1971 to 2021 and explain “how that track was informed by or captures the politics and culture of that specific year,” according to Rolling Stone. “Also within the book are Questlove-curated playlists that serve as a companion to the chapters.”

His directorial debut, the Sundance award-winning documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), is set to arrive in theaters and on Hulu on July 2nd. He is already at work on his next film, a documentary about Sly Stone.

An unpublished novel about race and police violence by Richard Wright, one of the past century's most influential African-American writers, will be published next Tuesday, 80 years after publishers rejected it.

Music

Born on this date in 1894: blues great Bessie Smith. She would die in 1937. Here she sings perhaps the Song of the Century, “St. Louis Blues,” with help from a little-known young trumpet cat named Louis Armstrong, in 1925. Which makes this maybe The Recording of the Century….

Last week I covered the forthcoming 50th anniversary edition of Joni Mitchell’s classic Blue, and they’ve now posted one song, maybe her greatest, “A Case of You”— and the 2021 re-master is stunning.

Obscure, very early Sandy Denny performance, below, is simply amazing, and with some stellar guitar work—the song by one of music's little-known tragic figures, her then-boyfriend, Jackson C. Frank, who I will be profiling at length here some time soon. Bonus Sandy here with RT on guitar.

Film

Now let’s play “guess the young photographer,” in his this image from the great Arthur Rothstein, father of subscriber/Facebook friend/near-neighbor (and Dylan bassist on Rolling Thunder Tour), Rockin’ Rob Stoner.

Song Pick of the Day

And now from the man who was probably the subject of Joni’s “A Case of You,” Leonard Cohen, from 1970, with his great French Resistance song, “The Partisan,” performed here in Paris no less.

“Essential daily newsletter.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

“Incisive and enjoyable every day.” — Ron Brownstein, The Atlantic

“Always worth reading.” — Frank Rich, New York magazine, Veep and Succession

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.